What we've done

A set of work which looked at candidate enhancements beyond HDTV. We carried out two major pieces of work, one looking at High Frame Rate Television and another looking at 3DTV. We produced two main publications on this work and a highly successful demonstration at IBC2008.

High Frame Rate Television

We successfully demonstrated the improvement brought about by higher frame rates by shooting a test video at 300Hz, the world’s first 1920x1080p300 video. This material was shown at IBC 2008, down-sampled to 1400x788p100 as that was the maximum display rate we could get from commercially available projector. The video clearly demonstrated the significant advantages of increasing television frame rates, was widely discussed at the IBC conference sessions and has stimulated work on higher frame rates at other broadcast research centres around the world. The IBC2008 paper was also published in SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal and Richard Salmon presented an updated paper at NEM Summit, Turin in September 2011.

UK Patent Application: Television Signal having high frame rate

3D Television

The continuing success of the 3D cinema has led many in the broadcast industry to consider the possibilities of 3D television very seriously. The technical, artistic and financial barriers to the widespread adoption of stereoscopic 3D television are much greater than those associated with the transition to HDTV from Standard Definition production and broadcasting, and understanding these was an important focus for the team. We published a paper detailing the challenges associated with the production and transmission of 3D television programmes.